Eastern Michigan University Ends China Partnerships Amid Lawmaker Scrutiny
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Moolenaar commended the university’s decision in a June 3 statement.
“I’m proud to see that Eastern Michigan University has ended their partnerships with these two Chinese universities,” he stated. “University affiliations with CCP collaborators pose a direct threat to U.S. research and technology. The CCP is committed to exploiting our economic and national security and partnerships like these give them direct access to do so.”
According to the university, the partnerships did not involve any research or technology transfer but used teaching course content that is “widely available in the public domain.”
Eastern Michigan University President James Smith said the university is working with GU to dissolve the partnership and “elected to terminate our teaching partnership with BGU.”
He said that the partnership with Guangxi University does not currently enroll any students and they are working with Beibu Gulf University regarding enrolled students.
“EMU takes seriously the importance of protecting U.S. national security. We are proud of our longstanding designation by the U.S. National Security Agency as a Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance and Cyber Defense education,“ Smith said. ”EMU fully complies with U.S. foreign disclosure requirements.”
Two other Michigan colleges—Oakland University and the University of Detroit Mercy—have also ended China partnerships amid inquiries from lawmakers. Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of California–Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pittsburgh have also ended similar partnerships.
Although EMU’s partnerships with GU and BGU did not involve research and technology, both schools have ties to the Chinese military, lawmakers warned.
In the Feb. 18 letter, they wrote that BGU has a Maritime College that trains reserve forces and operates a “$2.5 million simulation complex that has prepared over 20,000 personnel at the China-ASEAN Waterborne Training.”
The training directly supports “the CCP’s aggressive attempts to claim the territory of its neighbors in the South China Sea,” the lawmakers wrote.
The lawmakers said that GU “has openly stated its intention to leverage EMU’s status as a ‘National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Security funded by the NSA’ while positioning itself as a critical hub to ‘export advanced cybersecurity expertise’ to [China’s] allies and cultivate ‘world-class IT professionals.’”
In the 2024 report, lawmakers highlighted connections with Chinese institutions that have open ties to the Chinese military, such as Tsinghua University and Sichuan University.
They note that these institutions also support the Chinese communist regime’s development of surveillance technology used to facilitate human rights abuses like the persecution of minorities in Xinjiang.
The report cited 2,000 papers that were funded by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and have co-authors affiliated with the Chinese defense research and industrial base, and more than 8,800 publications with DOD funding and coauthors affiliated with Chinese institutions.
Several universities continue to partner with Chinese institutions with China-based campuses.
